Guanabana Cancer Cure?

Guanabana: Cancer, Culture, Cures and Currency

User: Aliman5040 Creative Commons image of Guanabana Fruit. This has been proven to help fight cancer.

Maybe you have a constant problem with allergies. You find that Claritin helps you stay upright without sneezing all the time and you toss it in your shopping cart. Ever wonder how much money they are making? Since the active ingredients cost the company 71 cents someone did the math on the mark-up. It’s an astounding 30,306% mark-up. Down in the dumps and need Prozac? They mark it up 224,973%. So when you come across official press and government agencies telling you that products made from Guanabana have no scientific proof in the claim of curing cancer, you have to understand. Science is never pure and research has to have someone pay the ticket.

Cancer

Cancer operates differently in the body than other diseases. What cancer is at a base level is a cell whose mitochondria failed to trigger the life cycle in the proper order. Apoptosis is where the mitochondria uses the kill switch on the cell to signal its death. When that does not occur then the cell lives on without any function. It creates a tumor. This can be benign or malignant, but either way what a person has is cancer. That is why cancers are named for organs instead of a viral property. A person can have lung cancer because they have cancerous lung tissue.

What has been recently discovered is that if certain chemicals are introduced into the system they can take place of the malfunctioning mitochondria and end up acting as a kill switch to cancer cells.

Culture

When it comes to the treatment of cancer, you are coming up against the history of medicine at its best and worst. In the early 1900’s it was thought that heart conditions should be treated with small doses of strychnine- rat poison. There are plenty of other stories about what is more dangerous- the disease or the cure. Cancer treatment is always on that delicate balance. The problem is that the scientific method is always couched in a culture and that culture protects its own cosmology.

Cures

As such scientific research many days goes unchecked. When surgery for cancer was hailed as the next step, the number of mistakes and autopsies were not counted. When radiation was discovered in 1896 and adopted some three years later, the fact that the radiation actually induced cancer did not stop the intervention’s use. The two major accepted treatments for cancer are not guarantees. They have refined the process, but research has left many people on the side of the road in the name of “research.”

The current race is to find who can find improved outcomes for cancer patients by finding a chemical process that will act on the apoptosis (kill switch of the cell) without killing other tissues. The oncology community wants the patient to ignore that both surgery and chemo kill healthy cells as well as cancer cells. It’s not a perfect solution. The fact is that in 1976 the guanabana plant was seen to have the ability to kill cancer cells without killing healthy tissue.

Currency

When the oncology industry in the U.S. states that guanabana has not been proven to cure cancer, they are simply deciding to edit the research that is taking place. Guanabana (or gaviola) has been researched since the 1940’s and around the world it is utilized in tandem with chemotherapy to produce improved results. The best scientific research is occurring in Peru where they are using it on an ongoing basis for improved patient outcomes.

What Annona Muricata (gaviola) has been determined to have is certain cytotoxic properties. What has happened is that there is not a lack of research on properties of the gaviola. The rest of the world has less of resistance to counseling their patients to use natural interventions around nutrition that are common in their culture.

The U.S. has a billion dollar industry wrapped around pharmacology and if they can’t monetize it then it becomes suspect. There are even studies being done in the U.S. about gaviola and they make vague recommendations about “potential.” The issue is that as a natural leaf, the guanabana plant cannot be marked up by 200,000% like Prozac. Without that kind of profit margin the drug industry won’t allow the competition. So will we ever know if the guanabana plant can cure cancer?